Kolkata: Owng to the COVID19 lockdown, digital format of books, especially videobooks, are fast becoming popular with students and educational institutions.

Power Publishers, a 14-year old publishing company of India, is producing videobooks for students.

Ebooks were the earliest form or digital books, with audiobooks following after several years.

However audiobooks had the limitation of not being able to show illustrations and diagrams when it comes to school textbooks and guidebooks for subjects like Physics, Maths, Biology, Botany, Zoology, and Geography.

These books have plenty of diagrams and charts that audiobooks cannot express properly.

Videobooks are the solution to that.

These audio-visual format of books display diagrams on screen when they are mentioned in the audio, making reading textbooks a complete audio-visual experience, the company said.

During the COVID19 lockdown, when millions of students were unable to access new textbooks for their new classes, educational publishers were thinking of an alternative to printed books that can give the complete feel of textbooks complete with diagrams.

Power Publishers came up with videobook formats of science, mathematics and geography books for several educational book publishers of India and United States of America, the company said in a release.

These books quickly reached students who had not received textbooks in the new academic session.

“Videobooks are created by first getting the textbooks read by professional voiceover artists in an interesting way. Then that goes through the process of proof listening and corrections, followed by audio enhancement by our audio engineers. Finally, it undergoes video editing, where the images and diagrams appear on screen in video format when they are narrated in the audio,” said Pinaki Ghosh, the founder of Power Publishers.

“Video books work for students not only for subjects like Geography, Physics, Biology, Botany, Zoology and Chemistry, but videobooks also work very well for children’s illustrated books where kids can see the color illustrations on screen along with the audio narration,” said Anupriya Dutta, Chief Editor of Power Publishers.

“The best part is, video books are extremely affordable for the consumers and cost a fraction of a printed book,” according to Pinaki Ghosh.

At this time, the scope of videobooks seem to be unlimited; from textbooks, to children’s books; from graphic novels, to encyclopedias, from coffee table books to travelogues, anything illustrated can be very well adapted to videobooks, for the new generation readers who depend on their mobile phones for their edutainment.

As Power Publishers creates videobooks for students, they are ramping up for other types of videobooks that are not from textbooks.